


tear out all your tenderness

by Sparrows



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Additional Tags to Be Added, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fire/Smoke Imagery, Post-Chroma Conclave, Self-Mutilation, probably way too many uses of the word smoke but fight me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-10 15:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8923000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparrows/pseuds/Sparrows
Summary: In the aftermath of the Cinder King's defeat, Percy finds himself with a new problem, one that Vex won't let him try and handle alone. (Inspired by alienfirst's art of werewolf!Percy.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ( Title from "Howl" by Florence + the Machine - _"like some child possessed, the beast howls in my veins / i want to find you, tear out all your tenderness / and howl"_ )

There’s something wrong with Percy when they return to Whitestone.

Thordak is dead, but Raishan escaped - it’s that which puts Percy on edge, and for good reason. Raishan knows the inner workings of Whitestone and has infiltrated the city once before; she could easily do so again, and that means Vex is willing to give him a certain amount of leeway in regards to his behaviour, given the danger Raishan poses to his home and the stress that puts him under.

But the shift in behaviour troubles her. He’s become reclusive, moody, downright _snappish_ \- locking himself into his workshop more often than not, speaking in clipped-off sentences when he has to speak at all, refusing to meet the eyes of those he speaks to.

More worrying than that is this: he’s _avoiding_ her. She knows he’s doing it on purpose because three times in two days he gets up and leaves the moment she enters the room, and the knowledge _stings_ . He’d claimed not to regret their night spent together - is it catching up with him, now? Has she done something wrong? Is he _ashamed_ of her now?

Or is this a sign of Percy sliding back into his old habits? Vex still remembers how Percy was before his death, before Vox Machina helped liberate Whitestone; he’d had a tendency to suffer in silence out of the misplaced belief that he was deserving of it, and even now, he rarely reaches out for help even when he needs it.

Vex had hoped, between their talk in the woods and all that had happened after, that he’d know he could reach out to _her,_ even if he couldn’t reach out to any of the others. But plainly not. _Fine_ , then. If Percy is avoiding her, then _she’ll_ just have to go to _him_ instead.

She might even be fully dressed when she does it.

 

* * *

 

A little over a week after the fall of the Cinder King, Vex finds herself stood outside of Percy’s door. She is indeed fully dressed, having decided _against_ a repeat of the ‘open the door entirely naked’ strategy that had worked once before - she’s got enough sense to know when that would be a particularly bad idea. There’s little noise from beyond the door, though she knows he’s in there; she’d checked his workshop beforehand and found it empty, and there’s nowhere else in the castle he would haunt these days.

Taking a deep breath to steady herself, Vex knocks. Then she knocks again, louder, irritation beginning to build. “Percy, dear. It’s me, Vex,” she says, leaning in close to the door both to make sure he hears her and to try and keep her voice carrying too far down the hall. “ _Percival de Rolo_ ,” she hisses when there is still no answer, “open the door.”

The door, quite predictably, is not opened, and Vex growls a string of Undercommon curses under her breath. Just as she’s about to cast subtlety to the wind and start beating at the door with her fist, however, she hears Percy’s quick reply: “come in,” he calls, speaking with all the warmth of Vorugal’s frozen heart.

The door barely creaks when she steps inside, pulling it shut behind her before she strides across the room. With the way the room is laid out, Percy’s desk sits on the opposite wall to the door, and that means he has his back turned to her as she enters. He neither looks up nor turns around, his attention squarely focused on the table and whatever’s on it, so Vex strides right up to him and leans a hip against the desk, folding her arms.

She doesn’t say anything right away. Instead, Vex watches him work: he’s got Bad News stripped down for cleaning, Animus and Retort both set off to one side awaiting the same treatment, and Vex has always enjoyed watching Percy’s nimble fingers at work. He cleans and repairs the guns like it’s second nature to him, now, even taking a small rag to oil the wood that forms the majority of Bad News’ stock.

Not once does he look up or speak. He barely even acknowledges that she’s stepped closer; the sole allowance he makes is to nod briefly at her, but no more. The entirety of his attention remains fixed on the disassembled firing mechanism for Bad News, cleaning black powder from the nooks and crannies with a small brush.

Finally, though, the tension is too much to take, and Vex sighs. “Darling, I’m worried about you.” She unfolds her arms to brace them against the desk, chewing at her lower lip as she looks at him. Percy’s hands stop and he carefully lowers the gun part in his hands to the table. He sets it down with precision and care, and turns in his seat to face her.

When he looks up, Vex can read the weariness in his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says quietly, his voice roughened by a lack of sleep. The tone of it makes Vex remember black smoke curling from behind a beaked mask, bruise-dark shadows beneath the eyes that have always been there and will never fully go away, forgiveness pushed aside in pursuit of vengeance.

He had told her the exact same thing then as he is telling her now; she remembers the feel of his coat under her palms as she’d pressed him to the wall and demanded answers. _You’ll know when I’m not_ , he’d said, and ever since then, she _has_ known. He hadn’t been ‘fine’ then and he’s not ‘fine’ now; she will not let the man she loves slide into the darkness as he had so narrowly risked doing in Whitestone.

“ _Please_ , Percy. I’m trying to help,” she says, her voice going soft. She reaches out to touch his shoulder - and he _recoils_ from her, physically pushing himself away with a loud noise as his chair scrapes across the floor. Immediately Vex snatches her hand back with a wounded expression. “Don’t push me away like this,” she whispers.

What happened to the man who kissed her in the woods? Who shared his thoughts with her so easily, when he spoke of them to nobody else? Who gave her so much, simply because she asked for it, to the point where they’d given each other their hearts?

Or at least, she’d thought they had.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Vex says.

 _“I said I’m_ **_fine!_ ** _”_

Percy’s voice pitches into a shout, his tone ragged and raw as he slams the palm of one hand against the table. The whole thing rattles, every gun part shaking, one even falling from the table entirely to clatter across the stone floor; the lantern providing light to Percy’s work flickers. The sound of the table-slam echoes through the room like a gunshot, and Vex flinches away, moving off of the table and staring wide-eyed at Percy like he’d struck _her_ and not the table.

For several long seconds, the only sound in the room is Percy’s breathing, laboured and gasping and catching in his throat like he might choke on it. He stares up at her, his own eyes similarly wide; they’re bright, brighter than normal, the pupils constricted into tight dots by fear or anger - Vex cannot tell which. He closes them and looks away from her, hand trembling where it’s still pressed palm-down against the table. The fingers close slowly into fists, and silence reigns.

“I’m sorry, I - I don’t know what came over me.” When he speaks Percy’s voice is quiet, like he’s making up for the outburst. He sighs, long and low, and lifts his hand from the table to cover his face. “Thank you for your concern, Vex,” he says from behind his hand. “But really. I’m okay. I’m just… stressed.”

He lowers his hand from his face and turns to scoop up the fallen gun part, setting it back in its rightful place and picking up the brush once more. His hands are shaking so badly that Vex knows he’ll make little headway with the remainder of the cleaning, and yet she can recognise the unspoken dismissal hanging heavy in the air.

For a moment, she had seen something in his eyes, something soft and scared - but she shakes her head. If Percy doesn’t want her help, she’ll go. “Goodnight, Percival,” she says coolly, taking a deep breath to keep her voice from trembling.

He does not reply, and the door slams behind her with more force than Vex had intended. Alone in the hallway, Vex presses a hand to her mouth and leans against the wall beside his door, shoulders quaking and her eyes beginning to prick with the onset of tears.

 

* * *

 

To the surprise of nobody at all, Percy does not come downstairs for dinner. Vex picks uncomfortably at her plate, hunger chewing at her belly but her appetite unwilling to co-operate. Vax and Cassandra both notice her distress and make their own attempts to draw her into the table’s conversation, but Vex simply shakes her head and stays quiet. Vax - sitting on her right as he always does - rubs comfortingly at her shoulder and leaves her to eat in peace.

Vex excuses herself from the table early and visits the kitchens, collecting a plate of food and taking it up to Percy’s room. This time the door is locked, and Vex sighs as she knocks again. As expected, there is no response; instead, she sets the plate down beside the door and tells him it is there, and leaves him to his solitude.

The evening wears on, the sun - having sunk behind the mountains relatively early, given that it is still the early days of spring - setting and plunging the sky overhead into inky blackness. Vex spends some time up on the castle walls, admiring the stars; she has always loved the night sky, so vivid and vibrant, painted with swirls of colour and studded with the light of far-off stars. Tonight the sky is cloudless, exposing a spectrum of pinks and purples countered by the gleam of aurora lights over the peaks of the Alabaster Sierras. The moon shines down, heavy and round, raising slowly into the sky as it escapes the clutches of the mountain range.

Eventually Vex returns inside and retires to bed, noting with concern - though not surprise - that the plate of food beside Percy’s door has gone untouched. Her room is further down the hall, and Vex slips inside already shedding her layers of clothing and the thick padding of her leathers. She considers, briefly, sleeping in the nude as she prefers to, but the vague flurries of snowfall she glimpses outside her window make her reach for her nightgown.

Trinket is already asleep, lying at the foot of her bed with his head pillowed upon his paws. While he doesn’t quite snore, his slow, even breaths are loud in Vex’s quiet room and she gives him a fond look and a gentle rub behind the ears before climbing into bed herself. He does not wake, ears flicking slightly at the pressure; before long, the familiar white noise of Trinket’s heavy, huffed breathing lulls her to sleep.

Vex’s dreams are troubled but indistinct; she wakes several times over the course of the night, but each time cannot remember what had awakened her. She can make educated guesses, at least. For all that she had told Percy that she was coming to terms with what Saundor had said to her in the heart of the Shademurk, his voice still haunts her dreams, and she suspects it may take many months yet before it fades. But she’s getting better, slowly, and while she wakes frequently, Vex finds little issue in returning to sleep.

Somewhere close to midnight, Vex is pulled roughly to consciousness not by her own dreams but by a muffled _crash_ from his room down the hall. Her immediate reaction is one of fear, so sudden and strong that her heart practically stills in her chest - immediately she remembers the rakshasa, the Clasp assassins that had stormed in, and she drags herself upright to look about the room in wide-eyed horror.

Nothing. No assassins with poisoned knives, no tiger-men with backwards hands. Her room is empty of anyone besides herself and Trinket - still asleep, exactly where he had been when she’d retired hours ago, but having rolled onto his back with all four paws sticking into the air and snoring loud enough it’s a miracle she heard anything at all from Percy’s room. She would smile fondly at the sight, were she not still straining her ears for any further noise.

But she hears nothing besides Trinket’s snoring. Vex scolds herself for a moment for having overreacted. All of Vox Machina are twitchier than normal, these days, and Vex has never been a particularly heavy sleeper to begin with. And yet… there is something electric in the air, like the moment after a lightning strike, something that makes Vex step out of bed and begin to pull on enough clothes to make herself at least a little decent. She leaves the nightgown on, tucking it into her pants as best she can and shrugging on her coat over the top to ward away the castle’s chill, keeping her ears strained for any hint of noise outside of her room.

Just as she’s beginning to dismiss the whole thing as nothing, there’s a series of muffled thuds from the hallway, followed by the _slam_ of a flung-open door bouncing off of the wall. Vex abandons her boots in favour of yanking open her _own_ door, fumbling with the doorknob for a moment in her haste before leaning out into the hall.

She immediately recognises Percy, staggering down the hall. He’s got one hand braced against the wall, using it to support most of his weight with each lurching, uneven step; the other clenches and unclenches at his side in quick spasms. Even from this distance, Vex can easily hear the rasp of his breathing, loud and ragged like he’s run a mile, and every so often it hitches and he coughs, the noise harsh and grating to her ears.

“Percy?” she calls, her voice carrying down the hall. He pauses, pushing away from the wall to stare at her. Now that he’s turned to face her Vex takes a moment to look at him properly: he’s dressed, barely, clad only in a shirt, pants and boots, all of it rumpled like he’d pulled it on in a hurry, the shirt buttons mismatched and making the whole garment hang strangely on him.

“What’s going on?” Vex continues, stepping out into the hall. Percy takes one stumbling step back, hand still pressed to the wall, practically tripping over his own feet. His eyes practically _shine_ in the dark, luminous and blue and so wide that if she was closer, Vex is certain she would be able to see the white all the way around them.

He shakes his head, still stepping back. There’s an expression on his face that Vex rarely sees on it, and it takes her a moment, even in the dark, to properly identify it for what it is - _fear_.

 

He runs.

Vex follows.


	2. Chapter 2

Moonlight gilds everything outside the castle in a silver glow. Vex had pursued Percy through the castle, but even in his panicked state he knew the old halls better than she did and he’d easily managed to stay ahead of her, a pale specter with his white hair and grey shirt, visible for moments before flickering away around a corner.

The woods are a different matter. Percy will be much easier to track here; he’s not as clumsy as, say, Grog or Pike, not in the slightest, but he’s never had to learn the ways of the forest as Vex has. She’s had years of practice pursuing man and beast and monster alike through the toughest of terrain - one half-dressed lordling operating on blind panic is nothing by comparison.

While she has no idea _what_ is wrong with Percy, she knows she could never have simply turned around and gone back to bed. It hadn’t even been an option. He’s alone, terrified, clearly not thinking right - and possibly even _injured_ , Vex realises with a sort of numb horror, recalling how he’d stumbled, the rough breathing, how he’d been almost unable to support himself.

The snowfall she’d spotted earlier is still going, a late flurry likely pushed down from the Sierras, but it’s not falling thickly enough that Vex is concerned about Percy’s bootprints filling in before she reaches their end. It _is_ bitterly cold, though, and she finds herself thankful that she had at least taken the time to duck back inside and snatch up her boots, even if tugging them on had cost her valuable distance in pursuit of Percy.

As Vex sprints through the woods, she sees frequent spots where it’s obvious Percy tripped on something and fell, pushing himself back up in a tangle of limbs and leaving behind wide patches of disturbed snow. It’s worrying; he doesn’t normally trip over his own feet like this, as if he’s some kind of drunkard staggering home from the tavern.

That is, of course, the exact moment she trips over something discarded in the snow. She hits the ground hard and skids, rolling from her belly onto her back to sit up and look at what had made her fall. Percy’s boots lie discarded, covered in a thick dusting of snow that suggests it has been some time since he removed them.

Vex wiggles her toes, safe inside her own boots, and scrambles to her feet. What is he _thinking_ ? He’s already not wearing enough to keep him warm, Whitestone constitution or no; he should know just as well as she does that the cold can kill even faster than a wild animal, and there’s no shortage of _those_ in the woods.

The footprints continue off, deeper into the woods, and Vex keeps up the chase. There’s no reasoning, no pattern to his trail; the only consistent thing about Percy’s movements, apparently, is that he’s moving away from Whitestone and the castle. Several times she has to pause and catch her breath, and each time she curses, violently, because the longer she takes to find him… She pushes the thoughts aside. Percy’s path crosses multiple streams in quick succession, concerning enough by itself were it not for the way the snow is scuffed up suggesting at least twice, Percy had lost his footing as he ran through.

Vex finds his shirt next. It’s soaked, but easily identifiable as Percy’s with its fine weave and elaborate stitching. She unfolds it between her hands like she’ll find some sort of clue rolled up inside. The buttons have popped off and presumably are scattered in the snow at her feet, and the fabric itself is _torn_ in places - for a moment Vex’s eyes widen as she thinks of any number of beasts that might have savaged him, but the lack of blood immediately silences those fears. It almost looks more like Percy had been so desperate to rid himself of the shirt that he’d simply ripped it off of himself, not even taking the time to undo it properly; damage to the fabric aside, even the seams appear to have burst open.

The snow is falling thicker than before. Vex doesn’t have much time left; missing his shirt and boots, likely still soaked to the bone by his trip through the streams, she knows Percy’s edging closer and closer to simply freezing to death. She tosses the shirt aside - it’s useless now, drenched through and missing all but a few buttons - and keeps going.

That’s all she can do. Keep going.

* * *

 

Eventually Vex stumbles into an open clearing. The forest is utterly silent save for her own frantic breathing, and Vex’s eyes follow the stumbling, erratic path of Percy’s footsteps into the center of the clearing.

There - a pale smudge against a pure white backdrop. Vex’s heart leaps into her throat and she throws caution to the wind, darting forward and skidding to her knees beside the figure lying in the snow. “Percy,” she gasps, because it’s _him_ and he’s _breathing_ \- she drops to her knees so hard that they ache, slightly, where she landed onto the frozen ground but she doesn’t _care_ because he’s here and he’s alive, _alive_ and _here_ and not safe, not yet, but he will be if she can take him home.

When he tries to speak her name in reply, his voice is a broken, jagged thing - more noise than speech, and the sound of it makes Vex’s heart twist painfully in her chest. He tries to speak again, pushing at the ground to roll himself onto his back, but what comes out instead is an awful whining sound, high-pitched and broken and completely miserable, the sort of noise Vex would expect from a wounded animal.

“Shh, darling. Don’t try to talk,” Vex says, inching closer to inspect Percy as he lies flat on his back in the snow. She reaches out a hand to grip his arm, help him sit up so she can offer him the coat from her shoulders - and immediately yanks her hand back, hissing in pain and giving a startled curse.

Percy’s skin _burns_. It’s like trying to grasp hot iron; the heat of someone’s skin in full fever would be practically chilly compared to the way Percy’s skin scorches her hand. Vex shoves her hand into a snow at her side and watches as the snowmelt, sweat and water from the stream all begins to steam gently from his flesh, tiny wisps of white curling off of him in all-too-familiar shapes.

“You should go back to the castle,” Percy says, his voice still raw and rough. With a stifled noise of pain he shoves himself backwards - the snow where he’d been lying has melted completely - and scrambles to his feet, posture hunched so severely that he’s barely much taller than Vex, who stands as well with far less difficulty than him. He shakes his head, shivering head to toe. “I, I don’t… I’m not…”

Vex meets his gaze evenly. “I’m not going back without you,” she whispers. He stares right back at her, his pupils dark pinpricks surrounded by too-bright irises that seem to glow in the moon’s light. The whites are clouding over, blackness curling in from the corners of his eyes like ink spilled into water.

Percy takes two steps backwards. Stumbles as he takes a third. “I don’t - Vex, I don’t know what’s _happening_ to me,” he says, and as he speaks, the once-white mist of his breath sours until it’s black smoke instead; Vex remembers, vividly, the way smoke had curled from the edges of his mask and clothing only months before, and finds herself glancing over Percy’s shoulder for any sign of burning violet eyes. He rubs both hands over his face and then digs his fingers through his hair - still drenched, the usually-fluffy white locks plastered flat to his scalp - and then stops to run his hands over his arms, fingernails digging and scratching.

“Then come back with me,” Vex murmurs, stepping closer to try and close the gap between them. Immediately Percy steps back, nearly falling over in his haste to get away, and Vex stops, raising both hands placatingly. “Percy, darling… I’m _not_ leaving you like this. We’ll send for - for Pike, or Allura, or Gilmore. One of them _must_ know what this is.”

He’s not listening to her any more. The quick, jagged motions of his hands scratching at his forearms grow more vigorous, his attention shifting from his arms to his chest. Vex’s eyes widen as she sees the vivid red gouges welling up in the wake of his furiously-scratching nails, drawing stripes of blood across his chest, his belly, the tensed muscle of his arms. Rather than shock him into stopping the sight seems to spur him on, lips pulled back in a snarl of frustration.

Vex reaches out for him, remembering the forge-fire heat of his skin and not caring - but she pulls up short when she sees the holes starting to appear.

When she was a little girl, Vex used to burn her father’s documents: the letters, forms and other paperwork that made up so much of his job as one of Syngorn’s diplomats and ambassadors. She did it because she was an eleven-year-old half-breed bastard girl in a city that had known her only a year and already hated her, would _always_ hate her; she had been angry, spiteful, wounded, and burning the things her father saw as important had been her only means of rebellion at the time.

She remembers holding papers a page at a time over a candle-flame, or reaching a hand out into the hearth, and watching holes grow amongst the carefully-inked letters. The edges smoldered with orange-gold embers, the paper blackening and peeling crisply away from the heat. Sometimes she’d burn the whole thing, watching names and places and figures turn to so much soot and ash until the flames licked at her fingertips.

Eventually, Vex had stopped doing it, growing bored of the flames and dissatisfied with the ineffective rebellion it ultimately proved to be, finding better ways to anger her father. The memories, though, remain clear as day.

Like her father’s parchment held over candle-flame, blackened holes blossom in Percy’s skin - his arms, his chest, even his face. Dark smoke curls away from the amethyst-embered edges, spilling out as if he’s a hollow vessel, filled with fire and smoke and nothing else. Gasping for air, Percy’s fingers wrench at his skin, staggering backwards away from Vex until he’s almost to the tree-line.

Then he curls three fingers into one of the holes near his stomach and _pulls_. With a strangled gasp of pain, the skin seems to stretch and warp, unwilling to tear like the fabric of his shirt had, until it simply crumbles in his clenched fist, turning to blackened ash that reminds Vex of the remnants of those letters from years before. The ash falls from his fingers, turning into the same black smoke that now pours from the ragged, gaping hole in Percy’s skin. Fat droplets of blood spray against the snow, crimson turned black in the moonlight and steaming where it lands.

Vex’s own fingers fly up to the jewelled stud in her left ear. She should call for help, she knows, but as her fingertips graze the surface of the jewel her throat closes up tight in fear and horror at the sight before her, and Vex knows instinctively that Percy’s panicked flight from the castle has taken them both far beyond the enchantment’s reach. If she calls, nobody will hear; they are alone.

Percy ignores her completely, sinking to his knees as his fingers rake over his skin, digging in and pulling himself open like a predator ripping open some soft, vulnerable prey. Smoke curls around him in thick whirls and clouds, almost obscuring the flashes of bone-white she sees beneath his skin. Every few seconds Vex can hear the tell-tale _snap_ and  _crunch_ and  _grind_ of bones breaking, each new sound heralded by a muffled whimper of pain and another twitch and shudder of his body. Percy's voice changes, shifts; the breathing grows deeper, becoming snarls and a low, constant growl that more suits a beast than a man. Every fistful of skin torn away yields another cry of pain, another plume of dark mist rising into the midnight air, another flurry cinders scattered to the wind, mixing with the falling snow.

It feels like an eternity that Vex spends there, stood watching with no way to help, terror weighing down her limbs like a physical thing. She steps closer, inching towards him with a hand outstretched... and then the smoke _consumes_ him, the embers she’d seen before suddenly flaring across him in a blaze of amethyst fire.

Vex screams, trying to get closer even as instinct makes her backpedal, the end result being that she falls over backwards, landing hard enough that the breath is driven from her lungs in a pale cloud. The smoke obscures Percy from sight completely, flashes of violet flame barely visible beyond it making it hard to tell what’s even going on. It billows out, blossoming and blooming until there is nothing _but_ the smoke, spilling out from one central point.

Just when Vex is about to push herself to her feet, the smoke collapses. It starts to wisp away on the cold wind blowing through the clearing, the pyre that had only moments before been as tall as - if not even taller than - the trees all around now dwindling until nothing remains.

Or, almost nothing.

For a moment Vex isn’t sure what she’s looking at. The last of the smoke lingers, the fire snatched away by the breeze, and Vex sits up to peer at the crumpled shape lying a few feet away.

Another memory comes back to Vex - the Moonbrush, in the Feywild. The werewolf she sees now is smaller than Ukurat had been, but not by much; if it stood on all fours, she might just about be as tall as its shoulder, and she knows it would tower over her on hind legs. The pointed ears currently lying flattened against the skull are each as large as her own head. Wisps of smoke curl from the werewolf’s shoulders and flank, clinging to the white fur as Vex watches. She can feel her heart hammering in her throat, the seconds ticking past with agonising slowness. The werewolf doesn’t move at all; it simply lies there in a crumpled heap, the snow around it melted away by the inferno, each laboring gasp of breath making the chest heave. Dark mist huffs and curls between pointed teeth the size of daggers. Its eyes are glassy, unfocused, staring at something distant. They remind her of the perfect blue of a summer sky, unnaturally bright - too bright to be truly familiar - and in the darkness all around they seem to glow.

Vex sits up and then, fingers numbed by the snow, stands shakily, taking a hesitant step closer.

“Percy?” she calls softly, her voice sounding weak and frail, _frightened_.

The werewolf’s ears prick up at the sound of Vex’s voice, and with a shudder that travels all the way from nose to tail, it sits up slowly, like an avalanche beginning to move. Vex freezes, her breath catching in her throat as she looks up into those bright blue eyes - now fixed on her, the pupils drawn into tight pinpricks. There is no recognition in them; no sudden softness. Only the piercing gaze of a predator focused on fresh prey, and Vex realises a heartbeat too late which of them is which.

In a blur of motion, the werewolf _lunges._


End file.
